"On Alpine summits, when the wind is hushed." Here are punished the blasphemers, violent against God; usurers, violent against art; and sodomites, violent against nature. Among the latter Dante recognizes and converses with his old friend, Brunetto Latini, who prophesies to him his future fame and his exile from Florence: "'If thou,' he answer'd, 'follow but thy star, Thou canst not miss at last a glorious haven; Unless in fairer days my judgment erred. And if my fate so early had not chanced, Seeing the heavens thus bounteous to thee, I Had gladly given thee comfort in thy work. But that ungrateful and malignant race, Who in old times came down from Fiesole,[12] Ay and still smack of their rough mountain-flint, Will for thy good deeds show thee enmity.'" To which the poet answers with noble courage: "This only would I have thee clearly note: That, so my conscience have no plea against me, Do Fortune as she list, I stand prepared, Not new or strange such earnest to my ear. Speed Fortune then her wheel, as likes her best; The clown his mattock; all things have their course." The poets then descend the tremendous cliff leading to circle eight, on the back of Geryon, a fantastic monster, with face of a good man, but body of a beast, many-colored and covered over with complicated figures, being a symbol of the fraud punished in the next circle. This is subdivided into ten concentric rings, or ditches, with the floor gradually descending to a well in the center, thus resembling the circular rows of seats in an amphitheater, converging to the arena. In these ten _malebolge_, as Dante calls them--_i. e._, evil pits--are ten different kinds of fraudulent, panderers, flatterers, those guilty of simony, false prophets, magicians, thieves, barterers (those who sell public offices), evil counselors, schismatics, and hypocrites, all punished with diabolic ingenuity, hewn asunder by the sword, boiled in lakes of burning pitch, bitten by poisonous snakes, wasted by dire and hideous disease. As an example of the horrors seen in these evil pits we give one vivid picture, that of the famous Troubadour Bertrand de Born, who, having incited the young son of Henry II., of England, to rebel against his father, is punished in hell by having his head cut off and carrying it in his hand: